This paper develops and defends the view that substantively normative uses of words like “good”, “right” and “ought” are irresolvably indeterminate: any single case of application is like a borderline case for a vague or indeterminate term, in that the meaning-fixing facts, together with the non-linguistic facts, fail to determine a truth-value for the target sentence in context. Normative claims, like vague or indeterminate borderline claims, are not meaningless, though. By making them, the speaker communicates information about the precisifications that (...) s/he accepts. The analogy with vague/indeterminate language, I argue, lays out a new and interesting foundation for a subjectivist approach to normativity. (shrink)

The idea of higher-order vagueness is usually associated with conceptions of vagueness that focus on the existence of borderline cases. What sense can be made of it within a conception of vagueness that focuses on tolerance instead? A proposal is offered here. It involves understanding ‘definitely’ not as a sentence operator but as a predicate modifier, and more precisely as an intensifier, that is, an operator that shifts the predicate extension along a scale. This idea is combined with the author’s (...) earlier approach to the semantics of vague expressions, which builds on the idea of a central gap associated with a predicate. The central gap approach is generalized to handle arbitrarily many iterations of ‘definitely’. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is whether there is metaphysical vagueness. It is shown that it is important to distinguish between the general phenomenon of indeterminacy and the more narrow phenomenon of vagueness (the phenomenon that paradigmatically rears its head in sorites reasoning). Relatedly, it is important to distinguish between metaphysical indeterminacy and metaphysical vagueness. One can wish to allow metaphysical indeterminacy but rule out metaphysical vagueness. As is discussed in the paper, central argument against metaphysical vagueness, like those of (...) Gareth Evans and Mark Sainsbury, would if successful rule out metaphysical indeterminacy. One way to argue specifically against the possibility of metaphysical vagueness might be thought to be to argue for a specific theory of the nature of vagueness according to which vagueness is a semantic phenomenon. But it is shown that there are complications also pertaining to arguments with that structure. Toward the end of the paper, I discuss Trenton Merricks’ well-known argument against a semantic view on vagueness and for a metaphysical view. (shrink)

Vagueness, as discussed in the philosophical literature, is the phenomenon that paradigmatically rears its head in the sorites paradox, one prominent version of which is: One grain of sand does not make a heap. For any n, if n grains of sand do not make a heap, then n + 1 grains of sand do not make a heap. So, ten billion grains of sand do not make a heap. It is common ground that the different versions of the sorites (...) paradox arise because of vagueness in a key expression, in this case ‘heap’. One central concern in the literature on vagueness is to find a solution to the sorites paradox. Vagueness also gives rise to borderline cases. Since ‘heap’ is a vague expression, ‘heap’ also gives rise to borderline cases: there are some possible entities such that they are neither clearly heaps nor clearly non-heaps, but instead are borderline heaps. Borderline cases can seem intuitively to present counter-examples to bivalence and the law of excluded middle . If Harry is a borderline case of baldness, ‘Harry is bald’ can seem neither true nor false, whence it presents doubts concerning bivalence. Similarly, one can find the corresponding instance of LEM, ‘Either Harry is bald or Harry is not bald’, suspect. There are three main theories that involve departures from bivalence, and two of them involve rejection of LEM as well. Standard three-valued logic invokes the idea of a third truth-value or truth-value gaps; fuzzy logic invokes the idea of continuum-many truth-values intermediate between truth and falsity. Both these views preserve truth-functionality. Traditional supervaluationism involves rejection of bivalence, but adherence to LEM. The idea is that if an expression is vague there is a range of precisifications associated with it, where, roughly, precisifications are ways the expression could be …. (shrink)